


Cast Light

by titianArchivist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Brain Injury, Brain Mapping, Canon Disabled Character, Captorcest - Freeform, Community: homesmut, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Multi, Weird Overwrought Smut, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 05:07:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/683140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/titianArchivist/pseuds/titianArchivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time you first noticed Mituna watching you, it was already much too late. He actually sat still for the first time you could remember, openly staring through his visor like he was waiting for you to do something, a corner of his mouth quirked up as if with a contented secret. Then they all hit you at once: the images your memory had gathered unbidden of Mituna in vivid motion, an incandescent goldenrod streak across your still-strange, calmed and flattened world. You were done, you were gone for him before you even knew it.</p>
<p>In the dream bubbles, sunlight doesn’t have to hurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cast Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deadcellredux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadcellredux/gifts).



> For a prompt by the awesome [deadcellredux](http://archiveofourown.org/users/deadcellredux/pseuds/deadcellredux) on the kinkmeme. Original prompt and fill are [here](http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/39135.html?thread=41368543#cmt41368543). Also a huge shoutout to my kickass fauxrail [amberite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/pseuds/tatterdemalionAmberite), who apparently saw something in this pile of overwrought weirdness.
> 
> I would consider these characters aged up to around 17 human years for the Alternians and 20 for the Beforans, with some additional headcanons about lowbloods maturing more quickly, Alternians having to grow up fast because reasons, etc.

In the dream bubbles, sunlight doesn’t have to hurt.

It sifts through the trees to warm your face and your bare feet, and when you close your eyes to concentrate the space behind your eyelids glows ruddy and comforting. Warmth suffuses up from the pads of your fingers carding through his strange-familiar hair, drier and wirier than yours (Age? Trauma? Epigenetics? You’ve grown used to it; it’s almost stopped weirding you out that you have now paid far more attention to the texture of his hair than you ever did to your own.) Still, the light hours in your ancestors’ dream bubble are lonely, near-silent. Most have kept the familiar rhythm of daytime sleep. Mituna leans drowsing against your chest, his brainwaves under your fingertips long and lazy with relaxation but not regular enough for true slumber. His matesprit sprawls on her stomach a few paces away, chin in hands, alert and focusing in your direction. At first you found it impossible to read the blank white gazes of the dead, but after a sweep traversing dream bubbles you’ve learned the study of facial muscles and the set of shoulders. She is looking at him, not at you: watching the rise and fall of his chest.

Your power itches and sparks at you, gathering in the beds of your claws. It likes complex electrical systems, wants to slip unhindered across the boundary of his skull, dissolve into the fluid surrounding his strange brain, tangle with the processes of his mind. You hold back for a while, just listening to the neuronal pulses you can feel from the surface, memorizing what he feels like at peace. Baseline.

“So you’re still OK with this.” Latula shrugs tensely, recrosses her ankles over her back. Mituna doesn’t bother to respond at all; this has to be about the tenth time you’ve asked. But his brainwaves spike out of meditation, skitter unevenly, regather with what looks like conscious effort. You lean to brush your lips against the crown of his head and focus for a moment on only him. “Hey, are you ready?”

His eyes open; he shifts his shoulders back and tilts his chin to peer up at you. “Get the fffuck… on with it, Thollucth,” he mumbles, fake-careless. “You’re not gonna break me. Or… if y’do… we’ll kick your ath back to your fuckbathketth crathy home univerthe, tho… whatever.” He’s on edge, his response empty and automatic. You fight down the ache of sympathy and remind yourself of Mituna when he isn’t all caged up in nerves like this, Mituna vibrant and unguarded. A gleeful freestyle screed of obscenities, dragging your hands unashamedly where he wants them, grinning like the whole world just knelt down before him – even with two white eyes, he quickens you then, leaves you hopped up on secondhand vitality. You know that he is more than strong enough.

“Tell me if it hurts, or if you want me to stop.” You’re pretty sure by the movement of the scarred skin above his empty eyes that he’s just tried to roll them. But you’re talking to both of them again, and Latula nods. If he’s in pain, even if he can’t or won’t tell you, she’ll know and she will. Probably by braining you with her skateboard, but you’ve dealt with worse. You drink in the dream-spun sunshine and push your psionics to the surface of his prefrontal cortex. The red and blue tendrils are passive, sensory. You begin to map.

It’s like learning a new computer system, you tell yourself. It’s like sussing out the strengths and weaknesses of a mainframe, cataloging sickly bees or loose connections, nothing more. Except… “OK, parts of your thinkpan are dark, scar tissue. That’s expected. There’s just… more of that than I anticipated, given how highly functioning you are.” Except that every dead zone hits you like a blow to the base of the throat, makes you want to lash out scalding red and deadly precise blue and uproot trees and scream. Sweeps of discipline hold your voice calm and your hands steady. “The rest of your ‘pan has rewired itself somewhat to compensate – again, that’s normal, especially for a troll injured before the final molt. But the extent of the rewiring… Mituna, what the fuck did you do? This is barely recognizable as troll cerebral structure, and over here…” Except that every pocket of active mind amid the death glows like a treasure on your mental map, shines light into the part of your own brain where pity pools, makes you want to take each living cell into the palms of your hands and breathe warmth and strength into the thoughts it holds. "Over here, you’ve got some basic lung function overlaying an area that normally regulates language skills. But the really weird part…"

You swallow nausea and wrestle with your vocal chords. The structure that is meant to fuel psionics in your kind grows at the geometric center of the skull. At the culmination of the Helmsman ceremony, they splice the optic nerve into this core to convert you into a reservoir, your energy force-pumped out to feed the ship. Even when performed correctly, the procedure frequently kills. This place is an echo chamber for an inferno beyond imagining; to alter it is to trifle with the life of its host. Mituna’s is cannibalized, unrecognizable. Instead…

"Th- …thtop. SC, thtop. SC–"

You tear yourself out of his thinkpan, displaced power crackling around your eyes and hands for a moment before sinking back into your skin. Mituna exhales and slumps against you, sliding down your chest as his hands reach shaking like winter twigs for your face. His fingers spasm; his claws dig into the hollows of your cheeks. You wrap your arms around his shoulders, catch him up, double over and kiss him with unbidden gentleness. He is hollow-light in your arms even as he leans entirely on you, his neck long and exposed and flushed your shared yellow-ochre, his pulse flutter-slam loud under your tongue when you follow him to the ground. It really doesn’t matter whether he is as exhausted or as overwhelmed or as helpless as he seems, or whether he is drawing you in to keep you from speaking. Both could be true – no, for the both of you are written in one duplicative language, built of the same senselessly binary parts – both _are_ true. You curl together in a shush of fallen leaves, tucking his face to your shoulder to shield him from the sunlight, two of your fingers fitting between his twinned horns as you rub his scalp and ground him and you could worship his symmetry forever, the touches of his doubled tongue to your neck branding like the first two points of the culling fork before the killing blow; could disintegrate in adoration for what he has held onto that you have lost. But that isn’t why you pity him.

\-----

You never really prided yourself on being exceptionally self-aware. Maintaining something like a network of radar emplacements in your own thinkpan was a survival strategy, an early warning system against self-destruction; it wasn’t for show. (Some of these Beforus creeps started expounding on the oddest, most maladaptive corners of their ‘pans within minutes of meeting you. You weren’t impressed.) When you were halved, your doubling tic had vanished, the mood swings damped to a slow ripple, and your all-consuming work with AA proved the perfect outlet to your jitters. Danger now was without, not within; you’d let your self-scrutiny lapse. So by the time you first noticed Mituna watching you, it was already much too late. He gave up on loudly and unsuccessfully trying to fix something on his skateboard without watching what he was doing and actually _sat still_ for the first time you could remember, openly staring through his visor like he was waiting for you to do something, a corner of his mouth quirked up as if with a contented secret. Then they all hit you at once: the images your memory had gathered unbidden of Mituna in vivid motion, an incandescent goldenrod streak across your still-strange, calmed and flattened world. You were done, you were gone for him before you even knew it.

By the time Latula confronted you about it, away from the others in the shadow of Meenah’s castle walls, it had gotten much worse. "So, kid, I’ve seen the way you and my boy MT have been looking at each other," and she grinned at you in a way that struck you unbalancingly of TZ: the inquisitor’s arch conspiratorial empathy that draws you right out into the open to be judged. "And I’ve had a good long talk with my babe about what he’s feeling."

It clawed at you, the pity, when you let yourself think about it, phantom pain scalding down the insides of your thoracic struts, and you wanted to jab a psionic tendril into her chest and see if she felt the same way, ask her how she’d stood it for so long. You stopped making any sense about this ages ago. You’re so fucked.

"On Alternia you would’a been stone cold killed for looking at him that way, right? Fuck genetics, just like, I’m hurt and pissed off and jealous, and I don’t think either of us is stupid enough to act like blood makes this anything other than what it is." You figured out pretty soon after you met her that she could drop the rad girl façade, but not – she pushed up her glasses and looked at you with blank exhausted eyes, eyes like a seadweller admiral, like a troll who had weathered thousands of sweeps of fighting the same battle over and over and over, and… well, now you didn’t need to ask. "But MT and me, we’re a different deal. I’m not a martyr like you and my boy are, but I make my own sacrifices. I think you can do things for him that even KZ can’t. So... he wants to talk to you."

She invited you then into their tradition of daylight picnics under the trees, and you pictured leaves and glow and swirling gold and the concave of Mituna’s stomach through thin warm bodysuit fabric, and she leaned in and whispered, "And anyway, I can’t pretend that I don’t—" Latula broke off and brushed a hand against the hollow above your blind eye, where a chamber in the bone amplified your power. You felt rather than saw the cold blue pulse under her fingertips, but you understood and shivered against the chill.

You made promises, that first day in the woods. Mituna clung to Latula’s hand the whole time the three of you negotiated terms and only let go when you sealed them with a kiss, both of them solemn and closed-lipped against you. You were still uneasy with sunlight then, the way it dappled across their faces and in your paper-cut-out vision registered as pigmentation (greasepaint, oh _fuck_ ) rather than as shadow. But when he asked you to take his helmet off and look, oh, then you couldn’t _stop_ looking, and you drank him in with your eyes and hands and mouth until there was no room inside you for anything but pity, ruddy as the sunset. And the illusion drained from you as if it had never been.

\-----

He twitches and hiccups into your shoulder, rests the flat of his tongue against your neck as if there's something comforting in your taste. Clutches at the back of your shirt and presses to you, horns to toes, doesn't let you move. Like as long as he keeps you close enough, the secret that he's allowed you to brush up against, locked at his center, will remain chained between your mind and his, a bright inward thing mirrored in your mental map of him. You could unlock him, could reveal to those who mean him harm the twistings through his latticework brain: if you take the turns slowly and keep your hands to the wall, how you'll circle inward and cross the crumpled threshold of a sanctuary, synaptic doors fallen open, stripped of bolts and hinges... But that isn't what he is afraid of, you're almost certain, and when you tear a hand from him long enough to reach out to Latula, shimmering and pulling in invitation at the air around her - when he shakes his head frantically under your chin even as the muscles of his shoulders strain in your encircling arms with the urge to stretch toward her - then you're sure. You nuzzle behind his ear, press a kiss into thin skin and downy hair and whisper, "I won't say it if you don't let me, I won't, I promise." You hold your lips soft against the shell of his ear, waiting for a movement to tell you whether he has heard, or understood, or trusted.

His hands go loose in the material of your shirt and stroke slowly down your back, and Latula slides up against his, smiling reassurance and palms curled quiet around his arms up by the shoulders, and from the look she gives you content and sphinxlike from behind him you think she might already know what he created from the ashes of his power. (He is so much more eloquent than he knows, even when he runs out of words - so much more than he intends, filters burnt to the ground, semaphore of hands and mouth and staring around empty rooms as if by looking long enough he will see her there.) When he lets himself go he starts shaking, caught between the two of you and knocking his forehead against your jaw, and you knew what he would want, as soon as he let himself, the last of your sensing sparks leeching out through his scalp and catching at the soft edges of his hair, a faded halo of red and blue. He clings and closes and tries to squirm in nearer, all nerves and rubbing up against you, even as Latula smooths circles into his back and holds onto his arm and grounds him. Mituna is shins and crowding ribs, needle teeth, wet breath, and you want to flow back into him, all the reaches of his body, light him from within with your power and incandesce him so that you can see every piece of the not-quite-familiar way he fits together and you push into the movement of his mouth on your neck, you want - He is - he's trying to speak into your skin. You strain at his chest, because even loose-limbed holding like this he's better muscled than you are, grown longer-boned and a bit broader in the shoulders and the leverage works against you as you force open a space into which he can speak.

"Pleathe," he's gasping out, "My - my head hurth - SC - you were there and now I'm - thtuck - SC, pleathe -" And he surges at you: eyelashes wet against your cheek, then claws dragging at your stomach, then his mouth on yours damp and cracked at the corners and tasting warmly of leaf-dust, slicing his tongue on your teeth and clicking at the back of his throat with a snap of forgotten breath.

You don't know if he really thinks you would do that to him, leave your footprints in the trackways of his mind and light your flame in its sanctum and leave him only half-taken. You can't just calm him now, hold his head in your lap as the last of you leaves him and his eyes glimmer for the smallest sliver of a moment blue and red again; you're aware that it could break him, laws of symmetry shattered, not to have you in his body as you were in his mind, as far as your limits will allow you. "Here," you pull back from him one more time, "I'm here, I will, I will, just wait-" And you wash him over, stopgap, in a swath of warm light, envelop the both of them and Latula drops her forehead between Mituna's shoulderblades and inhales long and deep, and he opens himself to it, pushing his breastbone forward and letting his head fall back as the air around them distorts with mirages and heat.

You still can't believe how easily you slipped into believing this was home: reaching into the bubble-within-a-bubble of psionic heat and pressure and closeness to work the bodysuit away from his skin as he grabs handfuls of your shirt and tugs hard enough to rip and Latula strokes at his back and arms and soothes; sits up, finally, and holds his head and shoulders and cards through the wild aura of his hair. It's the way he looks at her, even as you peel cloth from skin and can't help kissing knuckles and hipbones and the pale-gray insides of his knees... the way he steals imploring glances at you but mostly just stares adoration up at her as she anchors him. As if no matter how many times he grins and gripes and gives orders and grabs at you, no matter how many smile-slurred irreverences, each more complex than the last, he comes up with to elaborate on "Thollukth you _bulgethucker_ hurry the _fuck up_ " - he still looks at her sometimes like she's safe harbor and you're danger, or could be, outsider at least but _oh_ , he lights up everything that you have left and... even if you don't want out of this, the only way is still through.

You finally tug the suit over his toes and he is sunstruck and begging and you just - your mind is a torn and strange place, here, sun-dizzied, stretched full with secrets and worn thin with keeping up the warm psionic lapping against his skin and he writhes and digs his heels and fingers into the ground and just begs, "SC I'm thorry I can't I jutht - don't gife a fuck what you - jutht pleathe, pleathe -" And you want to wrap your hands around his spasming feet, dig your thumbs in and uncurl them - want to ghost your claws over his sides until he laughs out bright and unafraid - want to press your tongue to every joint and softening and every place where he grew taller and more solid than you ever will, but if you make him wait any longer you'll have a storm on your hands and you want this, too, more than anything. You drag your tongue along his thigh and into the crease and kiss against his nook wet and uncovered and you've hardly done anything yet and he leaves off begging and just _wails_. Makes lost indecipherable noises as you push your tongue in long and split and all at once and spread tendrils of energy everywhere you can't reach, stroking and snapping at limbs and bones and the planes of his face. You run his bulge around and between your fingers and just drink in his nook, his warm clayey taste and hips pushing stuttery-strong against your mouth. There's an alchemy to this that just snaps you every time, after a while, the quivering and the deep slick down your chin and the slow dripping onto the warm earth and you could come just like this, rutting into the ground, mapping his brain out over and over in your mind in reverse order spreading out from the center, tongue root-deep and rippling in him and _fuck_ , you want to, but you know him, know he needs to see it, see your face, and – god, his whited-over incendiary omnidirectional gaze while you –

Somehow you manage to crawl up his body without collapsing onto him like a wounded animal. It's his wet smirking mouth and his eyes all blown open with watching pinned on you from his matesprit's lap, and you wrap your bulge too tight and too fast around his and sink down like you've been dropped. Your thighs slip and stick against the mingled yellow slick on his and you grind your nook against his leg until it hurts, your bulge so out of your control and writhing into the fork where his divides hard enough to scrape if you weren't both soaked all down the length already. Your claws scrabble against his grubscars and his ribs and the dirt and he bows up into you and rolls his hips and sets the pace, in his element doing this in a way that you have never been, one of his hands clenched the fabric of Latula's skirt and the other scrabbling across your back, digging and dragging by turns as you scrape-suck-smear at his neck, at the first swath of skin your aching overextended tongue can reach. You want into his head again, want it with hyperprecise artificial intensity because there are other things that you _can't_ want subsumed into this, and the remembered pattern of living mind merges synesthetic and prism-bent over the instinctive shifting rhythm of his bulge coiling around and against yours, a wires-crossed nonsense ball of sensation and longing. It's this: It's that he looks like himself inside, the sculptural kind of beauty that begs to be shaped and then snaps down on your fingers when you press in. It's that you're so irrevocably immersed in this but trying to understand what _this_ is still sometimes feels like trying to see with the eye you don't have anymore. Her hands knead and work and stroke against his scalp, ruffle his hair wild and smooth it over, bury in and knead again, and jealousy floods acid-sharp through you and it took you time to decipher how many ways it cut, with these two. At least you can fit an image to what you want, now.

You slip a film of trembling awareness along the boundary of his scalp, between the pressing pads of her fingers and the nerves where he feels them, and even by psionic proxy the gentle rolling touch to the tender seal of skin at the base of your outer horns unclenches your jaw like she's tripped a switch, your bulge unknots what must have been a painful grip on his and you gasp, shocked pliant, prop your chin against his chest, struggle with languid lids to lift your eyes to her and ask with them, _Is this okay?_

She nods, just a tilt of her head in your direction, her eyes hidden behind red lenses but her mouth tempered into a muted smile, mostly sad but also beyond your competence to fully read right now, so absorbed in the distantly felt hands firm and certain on the pressure points around your horns, unsuspending the both of you piece by piece, unlocking joints in deliberate succession until you stroke at his sides instead of clawing, bulges twining and stroking and squeezing but not to pain anymore, and it's easier to keep your teeth behind your lips as you drag your tongue in a wet double line over his collarbone. Their names struggle with each other at the tip of it and you are sun-warmed all over, fixed here under two sets of white eyes and the name you moan could be Mituna's or his matesprit's or some tangle of both as he rolls you to the ground and takes this over, _finally_ , kisses you wide-open and deep and without any qualms about his own fangs, messy and missing and nicking your cheek, rubbing whole-body against you jaw and ankles and the insides of his arms like the whole surface of him is as stretched-thin awake as the wet blood-yellow tips of his bulge that press steady as fingers, illusory-deliberate up your length. Everything uncomplicates in this, just your body sprawling to give him all the surface he wants from you, just your hands hushing into the fuzz and sheen of his hair and the twitchy laughing out-of-place sounds he makes into your mouth, so easy to form yourself to fit him, until all of it fades into irrelevance under the rough coaxing curl of his hand around your joined bulges. You pull light but urgent warning at the roots of his hair, and when he breaks from your mouth to look at you his face is planed crisp in your flattened vision even this close, no focus to fall out of, his face that is a ravaged uplifted wise-glowing-eager-joyous resculpting of your own, his voice that lisps and mangles your name and speaks it with peeled-bare desire and blade-deep intricate understanding - 

And under his watch you fly past the edge, shake apart in dizzy expansive peaks, wrenched up by the base of your spine, psionic arcs and flares and resolutions in a simultaneous all-over snap that always sets him off with you, the secondhand shock - you amplify it for him, sometimes, push deeper into his skin than just the helpless involuntary electrifying of the weird way you come, but this time you know you don't need to. He makes a noise that's all tongue and voicebox and no breath and spills over you arced convex and yanking his head out of your hands, _overwhelmed_ written all through his limbs, eyes wild and almost scared as you swim through heavy soporific relief to hold and murmur and praise him through it, _I'm here I've got you oh god I pity you_ -

\-----

You saw it apparitional in the wreck of your vision when you came, the gorgeous misplaced impossible thing at the center of his thinkpan. That in the screaming hopeless seconds when his own power hung on the verge of beginning to consume him – or maybe he knew, maybe it hung incomprehensible over him for sweeps like your blindness did – maybe he _planned_ –

But either way it had to be choice, far too intricate for accident, what he created in the very last act of his power overwriting itself. Resonant in that vaulted projecting place, self-evident and unmistakable and cupped delicate into the shape, you have been told, of a sacred flower that grows from water: the four-lobed corolla of the structure where emotion centers, one curled petal for each of the quadrants, all intact, all recreated perfect... although the part of his 'pan that should have housed them is blasted beyond repair.

You keep your promise, after. You talk to Latula about everything you found but that, the choice he made all at once entirely for her sake and not for her at all, for his remade self alone, the foundation he chose for the slow internal work of building a new Mituna of his own ashes. It was an unthinkable sacrifice and it was nothing like a sacrifice, it is your own fate funhouse-mirrored and you know what it is to give something up for someone that is too vast to speak of without endangering everything. You had your own reasons for leaving the meteor. She doesn't ask, and you hold the secret close.

But still you hear it in Latula's low measured slang-cadenced voice, as incisive as TZ, her knowledge as closely held. "You can help him," she says, and you nod.


End file.
